The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams Page A

back. Dante Alighieri! And the room where Romance Languages was taught at St. George’s; the smell of floor wax and the brightness of the boys’ white shirts, light rippling against the walls and the snow falling, vanishing into the sea.
    “You’re back in that second-rate prep school, aren’t you?” Ginger said. “Let me tell you what it’s like here. I’ll give you just a hint. If we see an ant heap, we don’t think of it as an ant heap.”
    “No?”
    “It’s not an ant heap at all. That’s the way it is here. It takes some getting used to.”
    Ginger was preparing to go. Carter could feel the grotesque gathering of resources this always entailed.
    “I’ll give you another hint too, Mr. Clueless,” she said. “There isn’t any mountain.”

7
    A lice couldn’t decide between the wrist-lock slingshot and a BB air pistol. The latter would be more accurate at a distance, but she didn’t want to leave a lot of spent ammunition all over the place. Something might eat it, a tortoise or a quail, so she settled on the slingshot. It’s a beginning, she told Annabel. But it took her longer than she expected to master the weapon.
    Annabel said, “I think maybe you shouldn’t go after the ones wearing those little warning bells on their collars.”
    “Bells don’t make any difference,” Alice said.
    “But it shows the owner’s trying to be considerate,” Annabel said.
    Alice had a little folding shovel she carried in case her efforts were successful. Quickly the cat would disappear down a hole in the desert.
    “Those signs on the phone poles are kind of getting to me, too,” Annabel said. “Like Tina.”
    Tina is a member of the family. Please help!
    “And Poco Bueno Trouble.”
    Poco Bueno Trouble needs his medicine!
    “I don’t know you very well, Alice, but I think killing a cat would be beneath you in many ways.”
    “Progressive social theories are beginning to consider murder a matter of little concern,” Alice said. “Anyway, cats are false figures. People have them around so they don’t have to address real animals.”
    “But a dog wouldn’t be a real animal then either. What do you mean?”
    They were out at Marquise School, and Alice was showing Annabel around. On a weekend afternoon, the place resembled a chic but deserted shopping center. There were fountain sculptures by gifted students, low, tasteful adobe buildings, old cottonwood and olive trees.
    “If you love animals, you’ve got to love all animals,” Annabel said stubbornly. “I had a dream last night, and you were in love with an animal. You introduced me to him. He was … well, he looked like a person, but I
knew
. Plus you said … I mean, you admitted it. I wasn’t happy for you, but I pretended to be. Then I woke up.”
    “In my room I have a picture of a woman trysting with an octopus in a hotel room. Actually, it’s more like a squid. A cross between the two. It’s a great picture. The squid is sort of sitting in a chair, comforting her. Light streams through the window across the unmade bed.”
    “There’s no picture like that,” Annabel said.
    “I look at it and think, Women are capable of anything.”
    “A woman thought that up, you mean,” Annabel said. She couldn’t believe this school didn’t have boys, that she’d be going to a school without boys. Boys were nice, boys were normal. Alice was clearly not normal, even though she was, at present, all Annabel had—not counting Corvus, whom Annabel found difficult to think of as a friend, despite the fact that the three of them were frequently together, making up, in Alice’s phrase, a not quite harmless-looking group. That was typical of Alice, wanting to appear not quite harmless. Annabel felt she had some insight into Alice; she wouldn’t want much more. By the time school began, Annabel was hopeful that they would have gone their separate ways. She would meet new girls and make new friends, and she would nod pleasantly at Alice when she